| Summary: | Antonio de Fuenmayor’s Vida y Hechos de Pío V (1595) is one of the earliest hagiographic texts written about Pius V, the most famous of Counter-Reformation popes and the victor of the Battle of Lepanto (1571). But, because Fuenmayor wrote in Spanish rather than Italian, his text has never received much attention. This article presents it in its context for the first time and argues that it highlights an important problem in developing genre of early modern Spanish historiography: how to incorporate the pope in the national histories promoted by Philip II, III, and IV? Contemporary Spaniards praised the Vida y Hechos de Pío V highly, a fact which may have had as much to do with its highly political role as a critical rebuke of Clement VIII and, later, of Urban VIII as it did with the text’s literary qualities. The fact that Fuenmayor’s depiction of Pius V is just as interesting and carefully constructed as the better-known Italian examples reminds us to be careful how we prioritize such examples of Counter-Reformation hagiography. Moreover, its existence underlines how Italians, who staffed most of the papacy’s offices at this time, hardly held a monopoly on projecting or defining the papacy’s image. Other Catholics, in this case the Spanish Monarchy and its agents, in order to further their own political interests, put forward rival visions that were at odds with those emanating from Rome.
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